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With all the roadblocks thrown up by the Supreme Court, should school systems still try to pursue diversity? One district in North Carolina said yes and, as a new study shows, reaped solid rewards for the kids.
After years of progress in reducing racial segregation in schools, North Carolina began to go the other way in the 1990s. A series of Supreme Court decisions had undermined the districts’ ability to assign students to schools based on race. Districts began abandoning their diversity plans in droves and reverting back to a time when your ZIP code was your educational destiny.
But the Wake County Public School System took a different approach. In place of race-based school assignment policies, it implemented plans that emphasized socioeconomic diversity.
The new study, published online this week in the journal Urban Education, looks at the impact of school assignment plans based on socioeconomic status in Wake County between 2000 and 2005. Duke University researchers focused specifically on how those SES-based plans affected school diversity and student achievement. The results were mostly positive.
Wake County schools became less racially integrated than they had been under the earlier race-based school assignment plan. But they remained more diverse than schools in surrounding districts that used housing location to determine where students went to class.
In addition, the achievement gaps in math and reading between black and white students and between white and Latino students narrowed. Some “evidence suggests that for math scores, this improvement may have been due to differences in school composition,” according to the study. Overall, students’ scores increased in Wake County relative to other districts.
